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Is it possible that expectations around attendance have never been reasonable or even safe?

In an ideal world, people shouldn't go to work or school when they are sick. Not only does it slow their recovery, but in the case of communicable diseases, it spreads the illness.

Yet a lot of schools have released post-pandemic guidance about how students should still come to school with minor illnesses. And most workplaces have dialed back extra sick time that was available during the first couple of years of COVID.

> Chronic absence is typically defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year, or about 18 days, for any reason.

I don't think having a cold or two is going to put many people in this category. Decades ago when I was in public school, the kids who were chronically absent like this were the ones who clearly had some behavioral issues or problems at home.

The linked study also demonstrates that the rates are strongly associated with socioeconomic factors. I think the real issue here is that a subset of people simply have fewer fucks to give about school, and that has been accelerated by the distance and space that COVID created between students/parents and school.

I was chronically absent in high-school and it certainly wasn't because I was sick. School wasn't very engaging and I maintained good grades while barely being there.

I can definitely see how COVID shutdowns unmoored some families from school and the return process made it a generally less compelling experience. If you aren't learning, socializing all happens on your phone, and you'll graduate regardless, then why go?

My colds typically last 3 weeks with about 7-10 days of them being full-on. I also have an (obviously) terrible immune system and get quite a few per year.

Obviously it’s not doable to stay away from school that much, and I only did when I had a fever or was puking. That said, there were probably some years I at least got close to that 18 days. I would think the few years I went on a vacation I definitely went over it.

> I don't think having a cold or two is going to put many people in this category.

Have you been around kids post COVID? Winters after the pandemic have been a nightmare for many parents. My nephews have basically been "sick" the whole winter (getting sick, staying home, recovering, going back to school, getting a new virus, repeat).

It's been the same for my kids.

Another thing I've noticed is that post-covid they've come home from school with more stories of the teachers just putting on videos and having the kids watch that, or else they just read crap on their tablets. What I'm saying is, it seems like education has also changed post-covid. It's like the teachers are still remote-teaching even though everybody's in the classroom.

This is public school, and maybe that's how they do it these days?

I’ve noticed that too! So many videos. “We watched a movie today” - what?

Is there some catalog of how many videos and things are watched during school hours, because I never remember that as a kid. Yes it would have been a VCR rolled out and all that, but if I wanted them to just watch a movie I could do that from home. So weird.

> Is there some catalog of how many videos and things are watched during school hours

I remember watching video 4 times in school total. At the time teachers didn't know how to start the video player so a kid always did that, the teachers weren't used to showing videos in class at all.

I remember video weeks at school, it was definitely a thing in the late 80s/early 90s. But then we also had study hall in Mississippi, where you spent one or two periods a day just sitting in a room doing absolutely nothing. The year I left, they wanted to make it mandatory (with the excuse that kids weren't getting enough time to do their homework, but it was really about saving money).

I went to public school in California in the 1960s and early 1970s. I remember a lot of time spent watching films and television programs during class. Sometimes the films had relevant educational content, but I realized even at the time that the main purpose was to pacify the children and give the teacher a break.

The worst case I remember was a social studies teacher in junior high school who, during the World Series, turned on the classroom television to the game and had us all watch it with him.

I have heard this from so many people, all over the country. I've heard many parents saying they're getting repeatedly sick as their kids bring diseases home.

Has anyone seen any actual research into why this is? It seems pretty serious.

We didn’t have so much as a sniffle in our house for 2+ years. Masking, distancing, and not going to restaurants—we just did not get sick. Even after the kids went back to school—we had them in a school with heavy-duty air filters in every room and high masking compliance, at the time.

Now we’re sick constantly, it seems. It’s so much worse than before. I think our immune systems are doing some catching up.

[edit] for the timing, we started getting sick a bunch right around the time masking dropped off to near-zero everywhere around us.

It totally makes sense though right? While we had zero tolerance, our immune systems didn't get any work out, and vaccines can only take you so far and doesn't cover many nasty RSVs anyways. Now we are back, and our immune systems are simply not in shape.

I’ve also heard that because of lockdown only the stronger variants of different viruses made it. So we’re dealing with them now. But I haven’t heard of any study about it yet.

Same here (and we get it too). These 2 weeks are the first time I don't have extra mucus in my chest because there is no school.

Tuesday we are getting sick again, sigh.

Most schools have a policy of not returning to school until 24 hours after the last measurable fever. One cold can burn 3 days easily that way. Four colds (easy in elementary school) during the season and you’re already up to 12 days. Throw in a stomach bug, and maybe some appointments and now you’re getting really close to the limit.

My daughter has missed 10 days of school because of a lingering cough even when not actively sick. She doesn’t sleep well and teachers now consider her disruptive if coughing in class. I think th expectation is no longer to go to school with sniffles and a box of tissues.

My daughter had a cough for 4 weeks. She saw the doc twice over that time period. They said it was viral and for her to get plenty of rest and fluids. Only had a fever for two of those days. If we'd kept her home every day she coughed the she'd have missed 25+ days.

> I think the real issue here is that a subset of people simply have fewer fucks to give about school, and that has been accelerated by the distance and space that COVID created between students/parents and school.

Some parents are even giving negative-fucks about school, in other words being actively against public education, teachers, and so on. I know of Facebook groups where parents share tips on how to maximize the number of absences without triggering various flags. And, a surprising number of my wife's friends from church have opted for homeschooling, so they can teach their kids from the Bible and skip all that science and math "liberal indoctrination". It's scary.

I can't believe how much of this is creeping into even HN too, a group of presumably above-average educated techies. Just look at the comments in this article dunking on the school system! Education is, for most people, their only shot at achieving the ever-shrinking middle class.

I recommend approaching people who want to homeschool with an open mind and a little empathy. They are not bible thumpers who want to eschew science, many of them are just normal people who do not like the bias and worldview that is being applied to education.

As someone for whom the pandemic inverted the hierarchy of needs around school, we are still homeschooling because public school around here is a glorified day care full of busy work. The one thing we are missing is the socialization part and are working to address it. But I promise you, we ware not bible thumpers, nor concerned about the curriculum per-se. Rather, the slow plodding movement through the curriculum and soul-crushing aspects of bored kids.

Obviously, not all of them are homeschooling for religious separatism reasons, and whenever there's a homeschooling article on HN, you'll see all the success stories post in defense of the practice. For every one of those successful individuals, how many are not so successful? We may never know, because most states don't even measure outcomes and/or make it illegal to even check on the progress of homeschooled children.

>Just look at the comments in this article dunking on the school system! Education is, for most people, their only shot at achieving the ever-shrinking middle class.

You're equating attending public school with "Education". The two can be mutually exclusive.

Having experienced how home schooling is in the Midwest, I'd say education and homeschooling is usually more mutually exclusive there than the vast majority of public schools. (Sample size: 10 public schools, 3 home school groups)

> And, a surprising number of my wife's friends from church have opted for homeschooling, so they can teach their kids from the Bible and skip all that science and math "liberal indoctrination".

I can assure you, the people newly complaining about "liberal indoctrination" in schools don't mean science and math. It's fine to disagree with people about what should be taught, but it's not productive to ignore how much education has changed and why people object to it, and then disingenuously mischaracterize them.

I'm pretty sure most of them have no real idea what they're complaining about, other than what the angry man on TV told them. See the giant, nonsensical hubbub over "critical race theory" a few years ago, as well as stuff like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/us/desantis-florida-ap-af...

There are probably legitimate criticisms of recent changes to public education, but it's never the things that Republican politicians harp on.

Also, for what it's worth, much of what my generation was taught in school was utter bullshit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me. If anything, the idea that my children would be taught that the Pilgrims and Indians were best friends, that Columbus was someone to look up to, or that the Civil War was really about states' rights is what would compel me to homeschool, not "liberal indoctrination." But many, like DeSantis, still appear to believe that these lies should be taught.

Critical race theory is not some made up Boogeyman. It's real, it's used to influence the curriculum being taught, and it's just as bad as described

Bullshit:

"Opposition to what was purported to be critical race theory has been adopted as a major theme by several conservative think tanks and pressure groups, including The Heritage Foundation, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and organizations funded by the Koch brothers. [...] In 2021 [Christopher Rufo] wrote on Twitter, 'The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory'' and 'We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.'"

"The Economist and Reuters have conducted polls on how much the general public understands CRT, a 'once-obscure academic concept', and they found that most people are unfamiliar with CRT and misunderstand it."

(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_controversies_around_cri....)

It is absolutely a conservative boogeyman and (for the most part) has never been a taught subject outside of college.

CRT is mainstream, and the foundation of tainted beliefs like "whiteness" being "evil" and somehow being the root of problems. It's a foundation in what teachers learn in training and apply in their teachings.

I would assume you also oppose teachers getting their Master's in education? After all, that's not a subject that has never been taught in any primary school ...

This. Even if I don’t fully agree with the motives, it’s dishonest to say they are just afraid of science and math ignoring the politicized atmosphere we’ve been dealing with in recent years across all spectrums of society.

Gah, it's not even the politicization! I dare you to sit through a 3rd grade class at your neighborhood school. Nothing gets done. They do projects with little to no mooring to curriculum. That is, unless you live in a top percentile district that values curriculum mapping, but then you were already going to be in the middle class at least. In the meantime, most of these schools are day cares so parents can work. Marx wasn't that wrong.

At my daughter's kindergarten they provide hours per week of ESL support, in addition to the regular material. The walls are covered in curriculum, including more about phonics than I was taught in my first 2 years growing up in the southeast. (Thankfully that era's anti-phonics fad passed by and even those schools got better.)

Things aren't always getting worse. And IME the schools tend to get better in the long term.

You're painting with a wide brush.

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> And, a surprising number of my wife's friends from church have opted for homeschooling, so they can teach their kids from the Bible and skip all that science and math "liberal indoctrination".

Thank god (ha, ha) for immigrants I guess.

The Internet’s been a disaster for civil society.

I was in high school 4 decades ago was chronically absent. I absolutely hated school and it really only provided unmanageable stress for me. I was entirely focused on getting to college. I was able to attend an art school which seemed to have a high population of un-teachable students.

I loved college and was able to learn. I didn't get great grades but I was participating in the education process.

lol, i was chronically absent for an entire mathematics degree and still finished with a 3.5 gpa. chronic absence doesn’t mean shit imo.

This winter has been brutal with kids. One bug after another.

If it were simply that, wouldn't we see a similar effect across socioeconomic backgrounds? Colds don't discriminate.

We are seeing a similar effect across all socioeconomic backgrounds. Or at least locally here, Hospital admissions for Winter 2023-2024 almost hit another all time high (nearly hitting the same numbers as peak COVID) - https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2024/01/covid-on-the-r...

I think we are seeing a similar spike across all backgrounds - other news stories in this press cycle have highlighted that one thing unusual about this surge in absences is that it's affecting affluent and poor districts alike, and that well-off kids are missing school too.

Anecdotally that seems to be the case in my kids' school district (although one complicating factor is that a lot of kids have family back in India or China and go back for long absences at winter break), and the culprit is generally illnesses, which have been extremely rough the past 2 winters.

Richer kids get more vitamins and high quality food in general, have more exercise, have good winter clothing, clean and warm bed sheets, their home isn't full of mold and other problems, their water might be higher quality...

The local hospitals in my community have been full of hospitalized kids with different respiratory issues this winter. My doctor commented that this is a post-pandemic effect.

I mean, my children had fever 3 weeks this year and we have been responsible and avoided sending them in school when they have very bad cough and runny nose (3 and 5). We are already at 15 days of absence this year because of that. Children are always sick.

Oh hey I was chronically absent under this definition.

I am glad my parents allowed me to be, because school was really, really damaging to my mental health when I ended up needing to be chronically absent.

Hope you got the help you needed -- but to my point, it doesn't sound like you simply had a cold?

Nope. Not a cold, although that was the excuse :).

And yeah, I simply just needed to be away from school. I guess I’m more so making a point that during the pandemic there was also probably a ton of students who realized they can learn without school, and it might even be better for them.

Before covid we'd ask our kids what they did and we'd get the usual super brief explanation but would assume that kids just didn't want to go into detail or didn't remember. After covid, we realized that their answer was closer to the truth than all the learning we imagined in our heads.

To some degree elementary school has always been a large part daycare and small part teaching. But the one big change from my experience is that amount of standardized testing even 3rd graders do. Every month or two there's another day or two spent on testing and then several days before that getting them ready for it. I can't imagine being a teacher trying to craft lesson plans around all that.

Can confirm it’s terrible. Part of the reason my long-time teacher wife got out was that so little of the work is actually productively teaching and it’d gotten worse with each year.

The other reasons were… everything else. Consistently toxic work environments across several schools, a culture of “just do a little more—it’s for the kids!”, shit pay, low social standing, watching students have mental health crises or terrible troubles at home and occasionally kill themselves while not being able to do much about it, corrupt petty-dictator superintendents, constant flailing between expensive “frameworks” implemented so incompetently that they plainly have no hope of working right, et c. The small part of summer they’re actually off and not prepping for the next year was the only good thing about it, by the end. The insulting demands, organizational dysfunction, and lack of support during Covid was the final straw—for her and lots of others, now the field has a severe teacher shortage.

> To some degree elementary school has always been a large part daycare and small part teaching.

This was definitely a fashionable thing to say last decade. But in a post-Covid world where we’ve seen meaningful deficits in skills as a result of disruptions to in-person elementary school attendance, I think we should re-evaluate this prior. It seems evident that there’s a lot more going on in school than just babysitting.

THIS!

Why did missing school under Covid have such bad outcomes?

I don't know what happens in school (in person), but it must have been something or you wouldn't have seen such a dramatic change.

To be specific: there was a big decrease in resilience in the face of difficulties (in addition to knowledge).

it is weighing the cows more often to get them bigger. The over indexing on measuring via standardized tests is costing us so much. Teachers, more and more, teach a mile wide and an inch deep and teach to the test, only to have that information thrown out of everyone's brains to get ready for the next regurgitation of the previous couple of weeks.

There is this liminal state of "sick, but not too sick to perform". A lot of us are fortunate enough to work from home if we've just got the sniffles, which lets us perform but not infect the office.

For those of us who can't just do work or school remote, I sure wish we could at least do like Japan and mask up. It seems like it should be common courtesy.

This sick but nothing really state you mention is weird now.

I think i never used to think of it, but after the pandemic like if my throat is a little sore but I don't feel tired or groggy am I still just expected to sit inside?A weak cold can linger for days, weeks sometime. I get multiple ways of thinking about it.

I think the guidance on colds is that they're less contagious after 4 days of symptoms, and more than 24 hours after the fever is gone. For covid it was different because you could be contagious before having symptoms, and the different strains had different numbers of days and even different sets of symptoms.

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I've never had COVID. In fact, the last respiratory infection I had was in 2019. I sing, masked, in a 90 member choir where few people do mask, and we've had a couple COVID outbreaks. In one case, the people who sat to my right and left both caught the bug.

I'm not going to speak to the particulars of the various mask mandates. That's a complicated and nuanced question. One thing I know for sure: N95 masks, properly applied, make a huge difference to (at least) the person wearing them.

shorter version: Cochrane Review on efficacy of masking vs. respiratory disease

For the communal masking method that was deployed early on in the pandemic due to N95 respirator shortages, you're correct.

> At best, masking is a practice that makes the wearer think they're doing something "courteous", when they really aren't doing anything beneficial at all.

Fortunately in 2024, individuals have the freedom to choose to wear an N95 for their own personal protection. These devices are effective when worn properly, especially compared to vaccines when trying to minimize transmission to prevent reinfections which increase the risk of long COVID.

You know, surgeons don't wear masks solely to protect themselves, right? They wear them to protect their patients as well as themselves. In fact, that's kind of the main idea.

When the droplets that you exhale through a mask change direction, they lose velocity, and consequently range.

I blame the lack of hands-on science education for the large number of people who don't intuitively grasp concepts like this. It's easy to blame things like right-wing media, but the media would have less power over people if they were given the opportunity to cultivate some common sense in childhood. In that regard, it sounds like things are only going to get worse.

In my area, you get 10 days of unexcused absence per year before parents and kids start receiving fines and possibly a referral to CPS. That number is way too small IMO, and it forces folks to go to the doctor constantly for getting small illnesses excused (school policies are 24 hours without a fever, but they don't take temperatures, it's honor based...), since you want to keep those 10 days for an actual vacation.

Why would you take your kids on a vacation during school? There are plenty of breaks during the year including all of summer.

Because those breaks don't line up with things like the solar eclipse.

Because those breaks don't line up with other cousins' breaks.

Because those breaks don't line up with great-grandma's 95th birthday, and she lives a full day's journey away.

Because those breaks don't line up with your work schedule, or your partner's work schedule.

Because my child is excelling academically, and I absolutely don't think that she'll get as much value out of being in school on Thursday & Friday as she will visiting her relatives in a foreign country for a long weekend.

Hammer, meet nail.

As my child's parent, it is my duty to be aware of their educational performance, needs, and shortcomings. Based on all that info, I have no problem deciding to take them out of school for two days to go trout fishing with grandpa, or to view the eclipse with grandma.

All of those situations existed in decades past. Why do parents think that school doesn't provide as much value as they used to?

People got pulled from class for vacations all the time when I was a kid.

It wasn't super common, but it was common enough that there was a standard procedure around it (basically you'd get the classwork/homework that you'd be missing and be expected to present it upon return).

I think a bigger part now is that schools are somewhat more overloaded, so missing class puts you "out of sync" and there's nothing to help you catch back up. When I was young the parents were expected to do that: I don't know how common it is now.

There’s a serious “butts in seats = cash” focus from admin, now. I’m not sure if funding arrangements used (80s and 90s? Pre-nclb? I dunno) to be different.

Correct, they did. And as someone who went to school ~20 years ago - the requirement the prior poster mentions was either not a thing or not enforced if the student was doing fine academically.

Pretty much no one raised an eyebrow about this sort of thing, certainly not at the 10 day total mark.

Why do you think the rules have remained the same?

Similarly, I don't think I ever had an "excused" absence, I didn't have to provide evidence or doctor's notes to the school when I was sick. That simply wasn't a thing that was tracked at all.

If you look at the history of why public education in the U.S. was enacted, there were 3 main reasons, none of which were actually educating children:

1. Assimilate immigrant children into American culture so that they would think of themselves as "American" first and whatever ethnicity they came from second. (Hence, the Pledge of Allegiance, national anthem, American football games, focus on history & social studies in class, etc.)

2. Provide childcare during working hours so parents could go to work. (Hence, compulsory education, hours that aligned with a factory schedule, high student-teacher ratios, etc.)

3. Teach children the skills they would need to be successful in the factory system. (Hence, attendance, arriving punctually, moving between rooms at the bell, following orders, not complaining, etc.)

What's happened over the last 40 years is that the factory system in America fell apart, and so the skills needed for it no longer seem all that relevant compared to actually getting a good education, which school is not all that effective at. Meanwhile there are new waves of immigration with parents that were often highly educated (moreso than native-born Americans, oftentimes) abroad; they don't buy the "this is what a good education looks like" explanation, because they have had an actual good education abroad. And the Internet in general makes people much more suspicious of institutions, because you can see the ways that different power centers try to enforce control of the discourse, and there is no unified discourse to get behind anyway. The public school system in America is deeply embedded in the industrial institutions that were developed from 1900-1980, and as those institutions collapse, the public school system collapses with them.

I'm not sure about parents in general, but I think schools do provide a tremendous amount of value now, the same as they did back when I was attending.

But that's overall, in aggregate. All those drops fill up a river. But a single drop won't be missed.

I get the impression it is more that many students that feel they were above the system are projecting other reasons into this, to be frank. Especially in forums like this one. Combine that with somehow we seem to have far less empathy and charity than in the past, and you get this sort of situation.

And it isn't even that folks are wrong; but evidence is fairly clear that nobody has a solution for education that works. We do know of a bunch of small things that can work in some situations, but at large, we are still trying.

Sorry, what? What does lack of empathy have to do with taking time out from school to go visit Grandma on her 95th birthday?

Lack of empathy for the how hard it is to run school. This place is dominated by people that know how things should be done and how things should be run. At large, they are wrong.

I'm open to the idea that I'm wrong on this, of course. Just peruse the top posts and you will see all sorts of assertions about how this isn't actually a problem. There are more than a few pointing out that schooling is irrelevant.

Again, these aren't necessarily wrong. But they are ignoring a whole lot more than they are talking to.

Sorry, I'm still lost. The GP was talking about all the reasons why their specific child might need to be somewhere other than in class on specific days. What does that have to do with empathy for how hard it is to run a school?

The GP is saying that all of the issues existed in years past. I'm saying that what happened is a lot of the current cohort of parents on this website were kids that excelled and likely did outside of school studying. For us, it may seem natural to think many of the things that you are seeing promoted on this site. That does not make these assertions true.

To add to that: Because leaving for vacation one day before school ends and returning one day after school resumes is often not even half as expensive as lining them up.

With one hand I can count all the times I was ever taken out of school in all my twelve years for any unexcused absences like these. Some of these seem farcical. Vacation lining up with my cousins' breaks? That's what summer break is for dude.

Truth is, some families just don't take education seriously.

I also find that attitude wild. Missing school by choice was something to be done only in extraordinary circumstances. Word of kids being gone for long vacations and such would get that look (“oh, they’re those sorts”) and a disappointed head shake from my parents.

(My parents’ background was dirt poor, rural, and white, to set the scene—but skipping by choice was something not to be taken lightly, you go to school, that’s how it is)

Same background as me. The times I 'voluntarily' skipped school were funerals of relatives. I think our perspective is the more common one in the general population, but I guess HN has a lot of those sort of people.

> There are plenty of breaks during the year including all of summer.

When everyone else is doing the same thing. If you do it at a different time you could benefit from reduced costs and reduced traffic. You can also provide your child with a more rewarding and engaging experience than the drudgery and frustrating inefficiency of the typical school pedagogy.

Even without that summer is a terrible time to travel to many destinations. IMO much of Europe and southeast Asia is way too hot at that time. Mid to Late Spring and early Fall are much better.

I remember when I was younger, people with international family often would take 3-4 week trips to visit. That was because it was so expensive and painful to go, and there were so many people to visit when you went, and infrastructure there wasn't great at "popping over" for day visits to each of these places. Plus, it was often a once in two-four year visit to see an entire side (or all) of your family. So these kids would just pop out of school for this extended period. Longest I remember was almost 2 months. Usually the parents worked out a deal with the school and brought a bunch of work to be done on the trip, with an exam or makeups when they returned. I was one of these kids, and it sucked. But it was possible with the right support structure. I think when people abscond with no thought to the continued education, that's a huge problem.

Yup, I am a first generation immigrant and we traveled to see distant family in the summer. We also didn’t have a Nintendo or cable TV, because you know, trade-offs… one of which was rarely education.

Why would you prioritize making your kids sit in school over taking them and doing something fun like a vacation, given the option?

My first thought reading the headline was that more people are realizing the irrelevance of school and work, and prioritizing other things.

Because school is important and not at all irrelevant.

It becomes irrelevant when you're ahead on all of your studies (or if a 6 hour day is completable by you in an hour).

I am in the group that took 1-2 yearly week long vacations in elementary school. Nothing was lost, since I just did the week of required work in half a day after returning from vacation.

Education is important, not school. So long as school is a means to receive education it is important. A lot of people don't think it is anymore.

How will people make money to be able to afford to do those things?

How does having more life experiences preclude someone from earning money? I'd go so far as to suggest that a more rounded "real-world" education improves their chances of making money.

We need to stop thinking of "education" as a monolithic school concept that produces worker bees through rote memorization and repetition.

How different do you think your life would be today if your parents pulled you out of 4th grade for a week in February to go skiing or to Disney or to see cousins?

My gut agrees with you, but then we'll be keeping our young kids out of preschool to go see the eclipse. So much for principles lol.

To be fair, you are talking about a rare event, that is educational and honestly damn cool.

The science teacher at the school probably wishes they could do it.

Last chance for decades without going to another continent. I’ll likely be dead before I can see another. My kids were too young to remember the last one, some chance they’ll never see another. We’re going, too—first time we’ve taken them out for something other than illness or a doctor’s appointment or something.

We’re in luck in central Texas as they’ve canceled most school for the eclipse!

that's awesome! we have to drive about 2 hours to path of totality.

Because flying anywhere during those few short breaks is about 3-5x the cost vs. traveling at some other time. I'd rather fly to Europe for $400 per person vs. $2200 per person; it's the difference between going and not going.

In my elementary schooling my parents would somewhat regularly (once a year, sometimes more) take a week or two vacation that didn't align with breaks, since sometimes things like family events, or good opportunities don't align with school. But my parents did it because they knew I wasn't really missing much.

I and a good many others in my classes were WAY ahead of the curriculum already, and basically sitting bored in class all day. I remember my parents literally asked my teachers to give me more advanced homework because I would constantly say I learned basically nothing or that days would go by wasted reviewing things I had already mastered.

So they were confident that I wasn't really missing much from being out even for a week or two at a time. I don't know if this is standard practice nowadays, but I know my parents also requested from the teacher that weeks worth of coursework so I could do them even while on vacation. I could usually finish a weeks worth of coursework within like an hour or two of sitting down, and I didn't even consider myself a particularly gifted student compared to some.

Regional holidays, weather, seasonal events, chances for better experiences, cost, unexpected life events.. there are a couple

Price. If you can travel outside of Dec 20-Jan10th and summer, you can pay maybe half. I have an annual grand trip around the world every year I do off season and I pay less for it in points or cash (mix depends on the places) than friends do to go to Hawaii for a week at Christmas.

What about just piling in the van and driving somewhere? That doesn’t cost more in the summer.

Is the expectation that a family takes a 2 week luxury vacation every year?

> What about just piling in the van and driving somewhere?

What about schools not sticking their nose too far out into the parts of life that they should not control? Like where and when we take our kids on vacations.

If my kids get good grades and catch up on any missed homework the school should not get spun up about them missing some days.

Turning schools into a mild version of prisons is not good for anyone -- kids, parents or the society. My 2c.

you can't teach very well if 20% of the class is absent, it just creates an absurd situation for the teachers

it's not that hard, if you commit to going to school, then just try to go and do vacations during school holidays

otherwise, just home school

> you can't teach very well if 20% of the class is absent, it just creates an absurd situation for the teachers

Why is this? If true, why this problem is not appearing in private schools that pretty universally do not object to parents taking their kids away for vacations or family events as long as kids master the material.

The teacher needs to have a program of study with specific topics covered, recommended exercises for practice and required homework to check understanding for each. If a student masters the material why does anyone care if he skipped a week? And if the student does not know the material he should get a bad grade, whether he was in every class or not.

That is how the school worked where I grew up (Eastern Europe) and it seems vastly superior to the mess we have in the US today, where many public schools teach to the lowest common denominator, making capable kids bored at best and and a nuisance to the teacher at worst.

because what's going to happen is if enough students are absent, there will be a big number of them who thought they would master the material no problem, would turn out to be wrong and then would bug the teacher incessantly to let them retake or do something to avoid bad grades. in most high schools in America or in many there are multiple difficulty courses, if your kid can master it no problem even when being absent, it is likely that this kid is not taking serious enough courses.

This is true, high absentee rates make teachers’ jobs much harder. It’s the kind of thing that seems ok when it’s just your student, but if everyone behaves that way, it harms the whole class.

Driving in the summer costs more;

Historically, retail gasoline prices tend to gradually rise in the spring and peak in late summer when people drive more frequently. Gasoline prices are generally lower in winter months.

>https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...

> Is the expectation that a family takes a 2 week luxury vacation every year?

Only at a certain level of upper-middle-class affluence, but for them probably. But even one-week cruises are much cheaper off-season.

Also, lots of travel is based around life events. I can’t control the fact that funerals and weddings can happen at any time of year.

We’re going to two in-law weddings this year and missing a single day of school. Fly in, fly out.

Funerals are bereavement leave from school so you don’t need to worry.

I feel like 90% of midwesterners would be agreeing with me…

It can entirely depend on your family/friend circle. For me and mine, In-n-Out is expected, weddings are happening in the locality of one of the families, many are day trips.

Other people's family and friends will have multiple destination weddings, etc.

Still suspect it's not a major component, kids can only have so many grandparents after all.

Is there a regional component to this?

Some of the “meh, missing two weeks a year for vacations isn’t a big deal” attitudes in this thread are very surprising to me, also as a midwesterner.

You can control if you are going...

Lol. Yes I suppose.

I think the answers you are getting to your question are reflective of someone we are seeing across many aspects of society. The division between three "haves" and the "have nots".

If course taking a kid out of school for once in a life time events should be okay, even applauded. And children who are excelling should be allowed to take that trip to Europe during school. They will learn more there than in a class room.

BUT, those excuses hinge in good academics and support at home.

I heard someone say once that at the end of the day, everyone is home schooled. If students are not raised in an environment that values education, it really doesn't matter if they are going to school everyday. In my opinion as a dad of two young kids, attendance is a symptom not a cause.

But penalizing attendance issues is a lot easier that fixing the core issues which I think are mostly economic and mental health related.

I and many of my peers grew up with one stay at home parent who volunteered at my school occasionally and engaged with my teachers. Now my wife and I both have to work to afford the lifestyle I had growing up. My kids are going to have to be in after school programs which are basically just babysitting even if I am in a position to afford good mentoring.

Cell phones and social media are also causing issues with older and younger students. Peer pressure is at an all time high and academic pressure is not far behind.

We are putting so much stress on these kids, when they are just kids. They need to explore their world, get their hands dirty and be curious. Not take yet another standardized test. American society is not kind to children.

Back to it being a haves and haves not issues. As someone with a sizable household income. I absolutely afford to supplement my children's education with museum memberships and trips to see events like the eclipse and frankly also mental health support. I am lucky to have a job that I can take time off anytime I want. But this is the bubble I am in of tech workers. The vast majority of Americans cannot do that. This divide is just going to continue to widen the gap.

When I was growing up, my parents (government workers) had to request time off up to a year in advance, and they couldn’t always get a summer slot. We often vacationed in the Fall

There are cultural events that don’t follow the US holiday schedule. For example, Nowruz.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Education is important, missing a week can set a student back by a long way. Holidays are fun and if you have the resources they are certainly worth doing, but not at the cost of keeping up with a child's education. If you can't afford the holiday at the prices when schools are off, maybe you can't afford the holiday! There are plenty of affordable holidays always available and kids care much less about luxuries than adults do.

> Education is important, missing a week can set a student back by a long way.

It will set some back, it won’t set others back at all. Telling a kid who can keep up or who is ahead of the class that they can’t take a vacation because another kid couldn’t keep up if they took a vacation is bizarre. It’s like saying that someone who’s ahead of where the class is needs to go to summer school because a kid in the class who’s behind needs to take summer school.

Why should we use the lowest performers as the baseline, and tell higher performers that they aren’t allowed to do things they’re fully capable of doing?

I agree. Our kids are very much ahead, in part because when we travel, they learn a lot. They seen new places, new ways of doing things, learn history, apply their math and other acquired knowledge, they often learn things ahead of time just because they interact with other adults, they get to use free time to apply their knowledge and interests creatively. And with the right timing, they get to see their relatives far away without it draining our savings, which makes them happy, which is not only important, but makes them better students as well.

If your kids can miss a week of school and not be impacted, you should investigate better schools.

I know why I am being downvoted: I am questioning the entitlements of the average tech worker.

You can have as many excused as you want though.

Back when I was in school about a decade ago, kids came to school sick as dogs as taking time off for being sick was seen as malingering. A friend at another school knew a guy who came to school with a stomach bug and puked several times throughout the day as they had a perfect attendance incentive worth grades, so to ensure he got his grades, he walked around puking for the day. I spent plenty of classes hacking and coughing.

So I don't think they are reasonable at all. If you are sick, you should stay home should still apply.

Minor sniffles and sneezes should not result in anyone staying home.

The pandemic has clearly altered this mentality but it doesn’t seem like a good trajectory. A little cold is barely an inconvenience.

No. Keep your kids home if they are sick. An screw every parent who thinks this way. My family got sick 6 times in the last 12 weeks because of this nonsense. If your kid is sick it's your fault if other kids catch what they have.

I dont care if it's "just the sniffles" It causes so much inconveniece for my family.

Unfortunately even if you have a "zero sniffles and max masking" policy schools are just a breeding ground for germ transmission. You're usually "infectious" before you're symptomatic, so it spreads like wildfire anyway.

School sicknesses are so common that it might almost be argued that the point of public education is to make sure everyone is exposed to as many diseases as possible.

I completely disagree with this defeatist attitude, and I do not think it is supported by evidence.

Regularly washing your hands reduces spread of the flu by 30%. (Old study, not going to find it.)

I will believe anti-disease spread measures are effective until they are proven otherwise.

> You're usually "infectious" before you're symptomatic

This trait of Covid was what made it unusual. For the flu, the most infectious period days 1-3 with symptoms. ("Period of Contagiousness" in [1]... of course there are exceptions.)

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm

Sure, and you should take reasonable precautions (including not penalizing "sick days" in various ways), but if kids go to school they're going to get sick.

I agree with this but if you knowingly send your sick kid to school everyone should be united in being pissed off at you.

This is how it always was before covid and how it will always be if you send kids to germ factories (aka schools). Get the meds, drink water, go to sleep.

Part and parcel of living in modern society.

It doesn't have to be this way. Covid has nothing to do with it. I didn't like it then, and don't like it now.

Then move to the boondocks. You want the benefits of community without the consequences. It's not going to happen and no I'm not going to sequester myself or wear masks for everyone else's benefit.

If you're sneezing and sniffling, please for the love of god, do not go to the office.

Even before the pandemic we had that policy, and it's a very good default. No, colds are not the end of the world, but they are genuinely miserable, and you will share it. And if money is all somebody cares about, well, colds also diminish work output, so one ne'er-do-well going in sick can screw up an entire department's metrics over the course of several months.

My office basically dictates that we show up regardless. Why? We work in legal services and our clients depend heavily on us and with massive consequences when we make mistakes. Court mandated deadlines don’t care about a runny nose.

I see no measurable impact on performance.

> Court mandated deadlines don’t care about a runny nose.

No, but whatever industry you work in and whoever your employer is, they should have enough staff to cover minor illnesses and absenses. If you are off sick and your company misses a court deadline thats on your companies poor staff management, not on you for being ill and staying home to avoid infecting coworkers.

Business isn’t always steady so it’s not tenable to have too many people onboard. Although we are hiring. It’s just hard to find experienced software engineers who can communicate with lawyers and are willing to do things like code inspections with nothing but a pad and pen. You certainly won’t be living the Googler lifestyle but it is way more meaningful, energizing and sociable.

This is just another way of saying you're under-staffed so owners can capture more of the value of your labor. It's neither virtuous nor effective.

No, it isn’t. I work side-by-side the CEO and as a colleague and he works more hours than anyone else. He’s a great person and a friend.

We have multiple people in a company of about 15 who have worked there for over 20 years.

Who are you working for?

Maybe for somebody who doesn't make him go to the office when sick?

Pretty much this. People keep kids home now for almost any reason at all and you'll get a chorus of replies telling you that your opinion is wrong.

People need to toughen up. Not every cold is covid.

Why do you care? Most public schools are so slow now you could miss a month and they would still have not covered more than a week of material

If you really think that, then you don't have a kid or worse: you have an abysmal school district.

Part and parcel why I purposefully bought a house where the district was highly rated. Missing several weeks is a serious blow.

I do have a kid in school. he’s a year ahead in Math simply by taking 1 class a week in supplement math school. Sure we have to do 15 homework day but that’s just an example of how slow they go. My kid is also pretty darn average so it’s not a natural talent thing. I have to drill flash cards with him cause school fails to teach those. All they seem to do is play games on the tablet. Maybe they learn something but it seems more like politically correct tv time.

Trust me, you're kid is smarter than average simply by virtue of you posting here.

Also- getting cold symptoms and simply not acknowledging that it could be covid doesn’t make it not covid.

There are so many cold critters out there that have always existed. Everyone blames covid when it's clearly the season flu, it's nonsense. It's time to move on.

This hypothesis doesn't at all jive with the data in the article, which is about chronic absenteeism, and which shows that absentee rates have absolutely exploded. This is not just about people with the sniffles not coming to school.

How is the mental health of these chronically absent kids?

Surely nonstop COVID reinfections aren't doing their brains any favors.

https://whn.global/scientific/spectrum-of-covid-19-from-asym...

I think we do have too little leeway for illnesses for school, but I don't think that's what is going on, at least anecdotally around me. Many parents take their kids out of school for week long vacations, for instance. Also, my son informed me that the day before a big break only half the kids will show up. Plus kids will often just leave because they feel like going home that day. I thought he was exaggerating, but when I drive by the high school he's in, I'll often see a few kids just walking home (or wherever).

In my country taking kids out of school for vacation is illegal and sometimes fined. For illnesses after the 10th day a doctors note is needed in school. Kids can only decide to leave themselves if they are above 18 years old. That seems reasonable to me. How are rules in the US?

Often in the USA the written rules will be similar, but the actual rules are completely different.

Few teachers are going to call the truant police on a high-school aged student who leaves during the day, even though technically they could. Younger students would more likely get the actual police called out of concern for safety, not enforcing school.

Some schools it's so bad that the system just entirely gives up, but doesn't document it - so you have students who have never been to class more than a few days but according to the records, they're always there.

My high school went from ~20% Jewish to 80% Jewish every Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

> Is it possible that expectations around attendance have never been reasonable or even safe?

When I read this, I thought you were making a more general point, rather than about missing school on account of sickness.

To the general point, I think schooling is entirely unreasonable, and a terrible way to bring up humans. Though, I obviously think it is valuable to learn to read and write, know maths and certain tools to get by in life.

But the rest of it is terrible - institutionalising children, filling children up with government ideas as if no other interpretations are available, the insistence of deference to authority, leaving no space for individuality, the application of some sort of 'people metric' where you are a problem if you don't want to sit for hours or find the propaganda dull. And this is to say nothing of the impossible expectations teachers have on them, which make the lessons even more depersonalising and uninspiring. In the face of this, we will see perpetual ai teachers and the lifetime monitoring as a good thing.

No wonder there are so many lost people - people who have been brought up by loveless institutions can't even conceive of what they have not experienced - the materialistic collectivised mindset seems 'normal', rather than being seen as an ultra-radicalised ideology itself.

Most people have completely lost sight of what it means to bring up children. It's simply not about farming out the job to institutional structures.

Government schools are like government housing: you only use it if you lack the means for literally any other option.

Back in the day I would go to work with severe flu like symptoms. My company championed heroics and I could get points for showing up on "deaths door" reporting to duty. Of course, a few hours in a manager would notice and they would send me home. If you just called in sick, however, "people would talk." Crazy to think about that in the lens of 2024!

Today, it is harder to keep your kid in school if they have a stuffy nose, than it is too justify why you are keeping your kid out of school. Winters are tough: our school nurse will send my kid home if he crosses some line that isn't very clear, even if he is fine otherwise.

I just don't see it as realistic that my kid be 100% healthy to go to school, especially during snotty nose season. But then again I went to school no matter what when I was a kid, it was definitely an extreme in the opposite direction. There must a balance between protecting the school and letting the kid get a good education that isn't interrupted too much (consistency and stability is also important).

Honestly I don't know what the answer is. Having a kid stay home sick is a tremendous burden for working parents. Maybe it's not so bad if one parent is a homemaker, or if you have a network of family members to support you. Many families do not. It's quite difficult for us to manage on top of the many times school closes when work does not.

We are both lucky enough to even have jobs that let you take a last minute personal day to care for your child, but many jobs do not work this way, or even if you can take off, you lose income. You're not going to keep a kid with a stuffy nose home if it means not having enough to make ends meet.

Tough shit, right? But kids get minor colds a lot. In the winter they just infect each other (and us) all the time. Often, by the time they show symptoms the whole class has already been infected.

The practical realities have to be acknowledged. The solution is to draw a line, on one side you are sick enough to be required to stay home, and on the other, oh well.

[dead]

I think some parents and kids have realised that much of that slog is ever less about the education and more about using children as tools for buffing the school or district stats in the best case or it's just riot control in the worst case.

Miss a day or two of school and now you're "behind" because you don't know some trivia¹ that's on your next standardised test. Mostly irrelevant to the student, but highly worrying to the school. The real things you need to learn, things like curiosity, scientific thinking, critical thinking, practical intuition, complex problem solving, unstructured information retrieval, team work and so on aren't easy to measure, so they're not really measured and then they're not optimised for. Which, when everything is minmaxed to death, means they're optimised against. That's the charitable, non-paranoid interpretation, at least.

I did a homestay in Germany decades ago and the kids left school at about 1pm and spent the afternoon in woodland unsupervised, co-operatively building a sprawling multi-storey "treehouse" that was about 25 metres on a side. I wouldn't be surprised if the skills acquired in that part of their childhood mostly came from there rather than bullet points about carbon bonds in benzene or something.

1: Sure trivia provides "pixels" for a hoped-for complete picture eventually, but the broad substrate you place these pixels on seems de-emphasised compared to just hammering decontextalised details that are easy to test until everyone is heartily sick of the whole subject.

You are missing forest for the trees - states dont want to raise a generation of alpha males with big ego and unsatiable drive to success.

Thats not what the core of any population is, and hence not much catered for, not in public state funded institution.

Now another topic is whats good for any individual kid and society long term, those can be quite different matters.

I see those points in same way you do, but consider them more a parental responsibility and a way to give your kids a head start if you actually care. Look at what kind of folks stay teachers and how they are paid - dont expect miracles. Sad state of affairs, but it is what it is

> states dont want to raise a generation of alpha males with big ego and unsatiable drive to success.

It's unfortunate because regardless of what you think, the so-called 'alpha males' with an insatiable drive for success are the ones representing the vast majority of the tax revenue.

In that case, that "core" of the population also doesn't need to know about benzene molecules, river erosion processes, history of some ancient kingdom and all the other trivia they load you up with at school. So, to me, it doesn't really follow that the curriculum is designed deliberately to churn out low-to-mid skilled workers. If anything it seems like it was intended to produce people along the road to being relatively highly-skilled people, but the implementation is as if by people who think that advanced skills are just the result of coagulating enough trivia (though I think it's actually an iterated "you get what you measure" outcome, rather than educationalists who actually think that).

Just like sometime who "learns" a language by drilling only vocabulary, this ends up serving no one particularly well - many people who would otherwise end up in trades have few practical skills taught and couldn't care less about benzene. Many people who would end up being PhDs in organic chemistry are bored rigid by the tedium of the process.

As you say, it is a parental responsibility. But the school system has spent decades telling engaged parents that the correct way to fulfill that responsibility to provide rounded education to their children is by sending them to school, and it's becoming clear to some parents that the school system isn't actually upholding that promise.

Perhaps it's because most schooling seems irrelevant to many of the students? I went to very good schools and actually enjoyed quite a lot of my schooldays but even while I was there I could see that a lot of it was a complete and utter waste of everyone's time.

I spent six years attending French classes and three of Latin. I can't read, write, speak, or understand either one. I moved to Norway fifteen years later and spent a couple of hours a week in evening classes for a year and a few years of immersion in the language and now I am fluent with much almost no effort.

So why do schools all over the world persist in educational methods that don't work? Why do they never teach people how to handle money, how to negotiate with tradesmen about repairs to a house, how to drive a car.

It could also mean that learning two languages in school improved your language learning ability, so it went easy for you later (which probably was the whole point in the first place — for sure nobody expected you to use Latin as a speaking language in you daily life).

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that people who didn’t learn other languages in school, face difficulties when they start doing that later in life.

> I spent six years attending French classes and three of Latin. I can't read, write, speak, or understand either one.

I spent ~4-ish years learning Spanish in high school and was the same. HOWEVER, after visiting Puerto Rico for the first time, I was genuinely surprised with how much was still rattling around in my head and how quickly I picked up new words and phrases. I was eventually able to navigate a restaurant without English at all in the few weeks I was there. No way I could have done that without the background I got during school.

Again... this is completely unsurprising. Being forced to use language is a surefire way to learn it. Being surrounded by it will mean most adults will be able to speak it in a few months. There is no way to replicate that in a school environment that is predominantly being taught in another language. You have your spanish teacher for what... an hour... and then go right back to English. As I said above: what's the proposed solution here? International trips for every student... that's just not worth it.

It's not the methods. If you and all the rest of your class would have been motivated the methods would have worked fine.

People didn't invent the saying "when the student is ready, the teacher appears" for nothing.

But following that it's a fair point that how we do things is not optimal. E.g. pushing kids into classes based on their age and than having everyone for the most part do the same things. People/kids are just different, different interests, different levels. Maybe it was a necessity once, but maybe we can do things differently now.

Are you sure? I struggled for years to maintain a decent mark in french class. 2 months of duolingo for spanish and I was able to have conversations.

A grammar, written first approach is hard and boring but it does scale to 30 students for 1 teacher though.

> how to negotiate with tradesmen about repairs to a house

It's called socializing.

> how to handle money

It's called math. Especially calculus.

> how to drive a car

Most schools do offer drivers Ed in America at least.

In my experience, the people who complain most that school didn't teach them X were the same kids who didn't pay any attention.

I don't even like schools, but this low effort nonsense should end.

Obviously you learned Norwegian faster in Norway. Good for you. The idea that a school should send kids on international vacations is ridiculous.

Kids have been soaked in the news that we're all doomed because of climate change, and they won't ever be able to afford the American dream, no matter what.

Consider the filter bubble your friend from the other side of the political aisle is in. The kids have their own and they don't have any real life experiences to weigh against it.

They know they don't have a future. They have no evidence to the contrary.

Why would they care about school?

I feel that people that graduated high school in 2020 had the worst experience (at least in the US) of any cohort in at least 50 years. They didn't get to experience really the end of high school, and those that started college in the fall didn't really get to experience the beginning of college, when many people make lifelong friends. Now they're graduating in 2024, where the vibe on many campuses is one of division, suspicion and despair over the Israel/Gaza war, and they're likely to see greatly diminished economic prospects (especially compared to anyone who graduated college in tech from say 2010 to 2021). Not to mention the general "vibe in the air" is one of pessimism in the US.

I have a ton of empathy for these people, and it makes me count my lucky stars for being a Gen Xer. Honestly, I feel like Gen X is the luckiest of all the generations. People generally don't blame us for f'ing everything up, we had the luck of growing up before the Internet and smartphones where we still got to just play and have relatively unstructured "kid lives", many of us graduated into the booming, optimistic 90s. Many of us got to buy houses before they became unobtainably expensive. Sure, we had the epidemic of parental divorce, and if anything that hope of the 90s has, at least for me, turned to jadedness in many areas, but I just feel so lucky to have been born when I was.

I think you got your years wrong

Whoops, thanks, meant people who graduated HS in 2020, not 2000. Edited.

I'm approaching 40 and I'm pretty worried about climate change and don't really think I can afford the American dream. I can't imagine staring down six or seven decades into the future at this point.

Every generation says this, they still showed up and did the work. Do you honestly think a teenager that was drafted into WW1 wasn't scared for their future? What about people in the Spanish Flu or Polio epidemics? People in the 50s thought we'd all die in nuclear war. It's so annoying that people think our circumstances are worse than our ancestors. They aren't, unless you're literally at war, your life is better than anyone before you.

Anyhow, kids are skipping school because their parents allow them to, it has nothing to do with "climate change," "COVID," or "the future." Parents should be heavily punished for truancy of their children, it's a form of child abuse/neglect. That's regardless of income, poor kids can't get out of poverty if they have no means to do so. That can be unpopular, it's irrelevant if it is. Kamala Harris got flack for that, but it's absolutely good to punish parents that allow this. If you disagree, you live in a bubble.

One of the lessons I learned as a kid that I’m trying to pass onto my kids: don’t let school get in the way of learning.

There are things schools can’t or won’t teach and unfortunately for them, there value was significantly tainted when parents got to see what was happening every day in the classroom.

I’m pulling my kids to go to see the solar eclipse in Texas next week. They’ll get to experience something that won’t happen again in the US for another 20 years, get to visit family they rarely see, and go to parts of the country they’ve never been to. Obviously I find more value in that than the day of school their missing.

That's great, but that's not why these stats have gone up so much, and while that is technically "truant" in Germany, it's not in the US. The kids in these stats aren't going on fieldtrips or even vacations with their parents (it's funny that you can tell the wealth class of this little forum based on people making this claim.) Their parents are at work most of the time or maybe even just sitting at home with them. If you've ever grown up in a poor area, it's much easier to understand why the stats are going up.

Are you saying that this generation is somehow different from all the others not because of their optimism for the future, but because they lack work ethic? I think that elders have been complaining of following generations' work ethic since pre-history. But I distinctly remember kids being optimistic (I thought irrationally so; I was a pretty miserable child before it was cool) about the future when I was in school. They all thought they were going to get handed a lucrative job after they finished a four-year degree at some luxurious university.

No, I'm not blaming the kids. I'm blaming the parents, I felt like I made this pretty explicit in my second paragraph. Virtually no kid wants to go to school. That's irrelevant. Some kids don't want to eat anything but junk food. You shouldn't let them. You're the parent. You cannot allow your kid to be truant. You are nearly guaranteeing them poverty, that is abuse and neglect, and it should be punished. There are some stories here of people saying it worked for them, this place isn't "most people," most people on HN came from families with money or had opportunities bestowed upon them. Reeks of privilege.

Forget the doomerism of what a child might think, again it's about perspective. That's not even why these kids are skipping class to begin with, that's just some invention people here have said. We're talking about kids that can barely read or write, not HN poster kids with educated parents or good surroundings. People are skipping classes because their parents allow it, kids will look for excuses and always have. The parents should be held liable, and it's not just bad for the kids, it's bad for all of society. People arguing in favor of truancy are totally detached from reality for -most- people.

It's funny - in a sense I pretty much agree with you; I had to be cajoled into school and everything as well and found it fundamentally miserable. Certainly I understand that without an education the future is quite grim (especially for me as I have some physical disability). But after that treatment, I decided it was not something I could ever put a child through, so in that sense I have some sympathy for these parents. Though to me the solution is obvious; simply don't have children.

I think people should have kids, society and humanity cannot survive without children and children can be a gift. However, if you're going to be a bad parent and don't see their lives as your responsibility, not just for their own sake but for the sake of society... don't have kids. But if you do, and you -allow- your kid to be truant or become a criminal, etc., you should be punished and held personally liable.

Do you think people set out to be bad parents? And do you think that they can be punished into being good parents? It seems pretty tough to me.

And yes, the idea of having children in order to feed them into the same meat-grinder of education and employment that I went through in order to perpetuate some cycle for reasons unfathomable to me is about the least convincing reason to do so. I used to think I was an outlier, but as fertility rates fall near continuously, I'm beginning to suspect that I was just early in realizing it.

For most of human existence, the great unwashed masses were illiterate, and society seemed to plod along just fine.

Where's the sense in forcing children to spend the best years of their lives as automatons to an education system, just to be baristas at Starbucks anyway? Everyone simply can't work a white collar job, somebody has to clean the toilets. We should at least let those people enjoy their childhood.

Your argument is basically "the poor should stay poor and uneducated," which I reject, and society should reject. Kids that are truant are more likely to become criminals (idle hands and idle minds do bad things a lot of the time,) be homeless, draw welfare, require public support, etc. That's not ideal. We can easily stop that from happening, we should not encourage it. You say they'll work at Starbucks, it's just as likely they will just not have a job at all.

Some truancy is because their parents can't enforce what their kids are doing (though some are just really bad parenting), or are too poor too (work double shifts, etc.) We can support those people with social programs, while also making sure their kids go to school and making sure the schools are funded, even hinging the programs on truancy. Incentives work.

Look this sounds really good on the internet, but this is disconnected from reality.

The kids chronically truant are POOR and have no structural support at home. They are not depressed upper-middle-class-kids. The more-informed (albeit misinformed) demographic you're describing is not the problem.

This is exactly true. The doomerism might affect a few, and I'd suspect more in college, but at the elementary and high school level there are much simpler and obvious explanations.

In addition, the constant blaring reminder that adults all around you will not protect you physically if it comes to that.

The fact that "school shooter hero" even has to be a term is absurd and embarassing for us as a country.

Even when I was in high school over a decade ago, the fact that we could have a school shooter was constantly present and I was always running exit plans. I do have anxiety issues but I can't imagine what it is like for children now.

Economics and climate change?

I'd be slacking off because it is clear that AI is going to be the brain job top dog by the time I get to career stage.

I see a lot more kids mocking AI on TikTok than fearing it, but I might be looking in the wrong place.

Fear it? I would be embracing it. Send my allocated AI entity to work and send me the checks. In a sense it is like having a body double go to school for you.

Oh goodness... This must be satire.

Just give it 10 years, when you freshly graduate college ready to start a 40 year career.

I'm in my thirties with three kids; hoping to be done with working in a decade or so. Tech industry is basically free money.

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.” ― Nicholas Klein

Somehow I don't think he was referring to corporate chatbots.

Ahh, climate change. The go-to explanation for absolutely any negative phenomena observed in the world.

> attendance has become optional

I recognize this with my own kids and my students. Two things: 1) since the pandemic the bar for a sick day has been lowered drastically. 2) Educational material can be found online in most of the cases, at least in my university. Students think they can handle it themselves from home.

These are not necessarily bad developments. What would be interesting to see is if the drop out rate has increased.

They are probably bad developments, as much as we want to pretend kids are strong minded independent learners, the reality is they are kids and need guidance and a teacher to instill discipline.

This is something we've known for millennia that we want to pretend isn't true because it's more convenient to ignore, also because of our obsession with venerating youth culturally.

Based on my experience the first problem there is that many teachers are incapable of providing guidance or enforcing discipline. And that's assuming the teacher still cares, which isn't guaranteed either. And with teachers having to deal with bad pay and crazy parents thinking it's the teacher's job to raise their kid that's not surprising.

Kids not going to school is a symptom, and it's not going to be solved with attempts to make school more attractive without actually changing anything.

Even the teachers that care are no longer (in many cases) backed up by the school and (more importantly) the parents.

Everyone in my high school didn't really care too much about taking a detention (it was annoying) but would work pretty studiously to avoid anything being sent home to the parents.

This is a complaint going back to Aristotle, almost verbatim.

We've removed more and more rules from every aspect of society and suffered because of it. It does seem like things are starting to reverse though

> Students think they can handle it themselves from home.

Some have show to do well from home, especially when schools opened up a little bit at the end of the pandemic: all was online, some students thrived!

Oh for sure, but the challenge is that every student has different needs; some thrive in at-home self-directed study, others need one on one care, others need a classroom environment, etc.

Policy is set through statistics and cost / benefit though; the protestant classroom setting for a good while was the most cost-effective way to get many students up to a specific level. It wasn't perfect, but it worked at the time.

> What would be interesting to see is if the drop out rate has increased.

Unis will drop their standards to get the desired pass rates.

They have a federally ensured revenue stream, in what world wouldn’t they raise prices and lower standards?

> school administrators have tried almost everything, including pajama day, to boost student attendance

Because "school but with one funny twist" is still school with the same broken system. It's like the workplace memes about ping-pong tables and free food, you can't fix the problem without fixing it.

Ping pong tables and free food worked pretty well for a while, but the true motivator there was the illusory value of startup equity lottery tickets it appears.

> the illusory value of startup equity lottery tickets it appears

Kind of like the lottery, you cannot win if you do not play. I could have a job with a paycheck, or I could have a job with a paycheck and a lottery ticket.

There are other kinds of investments that are less risky than isos.

I don't understand this attitude. Most sw engineers at a startup are well compensated salary wise. Who cares if you also have a lottery ticket.

Well at least 5 years ago it became clear you should value those tickets at ~$0 at most startups when making career decisions, so those tickets come at significant opportunity cost even if the other money is "good."

I've always valued equity at zero and am clear I want cash. Most companies have obliged and some of my equity has panned out. That's the point of job-hopping -- to acquire as much equity as you can. In my case, I've bounced around many AI startups and have my hands in many pots. You gotta be smart about how this works. If there's a certain industry you think will do well, doing a year or two at all the startups in the field gives you access to all the private startup equity. One of them will succeed almost certainly, even if most will not.

I'd claim you've been wise enough to understand there's a cost to letting your skills languish at a mature tech company that pays you liquid RSUs, limiting your future earning potential vs working in startups in fields with growth potential and where you can develop highly specialized and coveted skills. That's the real story I'd argue as to why your strategy is a good one v. diversifying with these startups.

I don't know maybe one of your startup journeys hit or will hit massively (versus comfortably positive) and I'm wrong but at the end of the day it's about your risk tolerance and understanding the distribution of potential outcomes. The distribution had fewer massively positive outcomes than we all thought in the economic expansion/zero interest rate days of 3-10 years ago I think, and that motivated people to stay late, play ping pong with coworkers, leetcode for sideways promotions, etc. That was my initial point, it wasn't the free food and ping pong it was the hope of a ridiculous (instead of decent) exit.

If you go and look at levels.fyi as an engineer in a startup, you get almost the exact same cash compensation as a FAANG engineer but now you have a bigger slice of a lottery ticket, can grow your career faster, and generally you are likely to have a 'free spirit' kind of workplace.

Even if the startup goes 'total loss', you lose nothing compensation-wise and get picked up 48 hours - 3 weeks later by another place.

Maybe I am anti-jaded (?) but I can't understand the allure of being employee number 290,000 where your job is to change the color of a button back and forth. Is $150k+ in cash really not worth actually being useful to a company?

There's no allure, but I'm old enough now to realize what a job actually is (a way to trade your time for appreciating assets).

Talked to my niece about this, she's highschool age. She says that during covid, her school set up all of the infrastructure for remote learning, and they _still offer it_ -- that is, if she doesn't want to, she doesn't have to go to class much at all, save for the school's attendance policy... which means that while she has a 4.0, she's also near truancy.

For a lot of folks, school was never good. If I had the choice back then, would I have gone if I wasn't _required_ to?

I didn't find this out until I had already graduated, but my school district had a self-paced high school where you could take classes at your own pace. It was meant for disadvantaged kids who could not, for various reason, be in-class for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

However, another reason you could go is if you wanted to graduate early. My wife finished her high school degree just a few months after her 17th birthday; 2 years of "school" were completed in 3 months. Had I gone a similar route, I could have been done with a doctorate degree by 23 instead of just finishing undergrad.

They count doing the remote stuff as truancy?

Given that I would do as much of my course work as fast as I could so I could slack off the rest of the time, if I'd've had distance learning as an option in high school I'd've been all over it (and perhaps learned not to double contract).

> would I have gone if I wasn't _required_ to?

Would you every worry about doing ok academically but falling behind socially?

Have you talked to children that attend public school today? School is not helping them socially whatsoever.

Do I think there has been an increase percentage wise in the amount (and in the awareness) of teenagers who don't like various aspects or high school (or children who don't like elementary/middle school)? 100%

But I went to public school not too long ago. High school, about 4,000 people. Really diverse culturally.

I think you can make the argument that you had "the majority" (50.1%, 2k+ teenagers) who "did well/liked it" overall. Did they dislike it for one reason or another? Sure. But I don't think 49.9% were bullied (social media or not). I would say it's a smaller minority/more "fringe".

Not to say that if it's 20% of children it isn't a very large problem. But... if 80% of people 'can and do' make it out + benefit from it + find a way to enjoy it... how come it works for them and not others?

In Israel a lot of the schools start with 20 minutes of body movement (at least near me).

The kids become active. It’s not as big a deal if they are a little late. And my daughter (but not my son) hates missing it.

My SO and I foster so we have to take training so many hours per year to keep our license. One year we were able to take classes with some teachers and one of the classes was about alternative teaching that included a lot of motion. Kids would have balls to sit on, small trampolines, etc in the class. There was a lot of motion during the day. I recall the teachers being both excited and sad; they thought the ideas were worth consideration, but they knew nothing like this would happen at their schools.

I wonder if there has been any studies done showing correlation between walking/biking to school and school success. Walking a mile takes about 20 minutes and personally I find that walking to work sets me up for success way better than driving does.

When I was a kid those who lived in walking distance walked or biked. Those who didn’t was bused. It was just about geography. Rural area though.

I had to walk a half mile to catch the bus. Worst of both worlds, at least from my perspective as a kid.

It was the same for me in a suburban area. We walked or biked to middle and high school until I got a car. My parents lived close to my middle school and a bus didn’t come to our neighborhood.

Indeed there have been, I can't recall the exact study, but I found a meta-analysis here: [Physical Activity and Academic Performance in School-Age Children: A Systematic Review ](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6616).

Physical activity has shown to improve mental health, which as a result improves learning.

That makes a lot of sense, and I think it’s something that would have helped me during high school.

Thats fantastic!

Talking with our local school administrators, this does seem to be the biggest challenge they're facing. From their point of view, it's just caused by (typically poorer) parents who don't care about their kids' education and saw how it seemed to be optional during COVID and so just don't make their kids go if they don't feel like it. It's really sad, and it sounds incredibly hard for anyone else to do anything about.

My experience with my teen has been that, post-pandemic, he and all of his friends simply decided they didn't want to be inside/bored like they were. We're struggling big-time to keep ours in class. We've tried incentives. We've levied punishments. It's like neither they nor their friends care - at all - about any of it (certainly much less afraid of consequences than I ever was).

Add the much more common use of drugs to the mix (from 14 on), phones that are not required to be put away in class, and it's very tough to keep them on track.

I didn't have half of the distractions/opportunities for entertainment kids these days have, and it was hard for me to muster up the enthusiasm.

The article points out the rise in truancy is similar across socioeconomic boundaries

It was 9% in richer districts and 13% in poorer districts - I’d definitely be interested in further analysis to see an intra-district breakdown.

This is the first comment I see directing the problem at the parents, where I believe it rightly belongs. Is it not the parent's responsibility to make sure their child gets to school safely and on time every day?

What do you do when the parents can't or won't?

Or take an example of a high school student who adamantly refuses to attend school, do you eventually just let him "get away with it" or do you put him in a correctional facility?

A tangent thought - I may be out of touch but I am amazed of little the school system changed over time (at least in my country), while in 2024 literally all the knowledge and all there is to learn in school (at least until university) is available on the internet with top quality video or resources. Yet students are expected to show up every day at 8 AM to 5 PM in my country.

When I remember my classes in high school - 90+% of the time is just the teacher talking, us copying on notes, the teacher demonstrating something or letting us do assignments present in the school book, it might as well be a video or interactive content. Do we really still need children to learn in this way and structure nowadays? Or is it just to let parents work they 9 to 6? It all feels... very inefficient somehow.

(ps : I do not have children in school, as most readers probably guessed)

>in 2024 literally all the knowledge and all there is to learn in school (at least until university) is available on the internet with top quality video or resources.

It's all mixed up in and endless sea of shit though.

no wonder there is usually a curriculum

Pedagogy relies on more than mere exposure to information.

To a substantial degree, information central to an education has been reasonably readily available since the early 20th century, a combination printing, cheap paper, and public libraries. Not entirely as convenient as online Internet access, to be sure, but a low barrier for a motivated student. There are notable examples of self-taught prodigies[1] ...

... but overall, organised, school-based education seems to scale vastly better. Teachers don't merely expose but guide, at least in the best cases.

________________________________

Notes:

1. One was, I believe, William Sidis, who'd taken refuge in a public library after being bullied, read Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, and corresponded with Russell over errata and corrections. I'm trying to turn up a reference, possibly The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy by Amy Wallace.

In-person teaching makes sense when you have relatively few students per teacher. Some things can’t even be taught by video or book. School is weird though. There’s 20+ student/pupils/kids per teacher. All neatly lined up. All sitting like a well-postured potato for the most part. Yeah, what’s the point? Are they really getting the personal, hands-on help that the in-person setting facilitates? Or is it more about parking the kids in that place where all the other parents park their kids between kindergarten and college?

This and similar issues shouldn't be surprising at all after we effectively declared that in-person schooling isn't really necessary and that kids would be fine staying home learning on an iPad. What were people supposed to take away from our handling of schooling during the pandemic response?

Its world wide. In the UK the increase was analysed and its all due to increased sickness. Teachers and students are sick twice as much as they were before the pandemic begun and teachers are the second hardest hit group by Long Covid behind medical staff. The official count of UK children with Long Covid is 68,000 but its likely much higher than that since the NHS is mostly diagnosing Long haulers with anxiety (hence why the press has been big on all the increase in mental health diseases).

Its just Covid, this is what living with this disease looks like.

My kids are still playing catchup in terms of illnesses since the pandemic. Our district masked for the first two years. Neither of my kids were sick for those two years.

Since then they’ve been playing catchup immunity wise as they’ve been exposed to all the colds and other viruses. Which means they are absent more.

I’m hopeful that they are almost caught up in terms of what they have been exposed to and the amount of times they are sick in a year will be declining.

Seriously it blows my mind that folks say masks don’t work because if you’ve had school age children you know how often they are sick and for those two years the district was masking we had nothing. It was glorious while it lasted.

> It was glorious while it lasted

this sounds almost like you regret that it couldn't

Or are we finally just accepting that people do get sick from time to time?

A friend at another school knew a guy who came to school with a stomach bug and puked several times throughout the day as they had a perfect attendance incentive worth a percentage of your grade, so to ensure he got his grades, he walked around puking for the day.

At the time people praised his dedication.

People are getting sick more often because COVID causes lasting damage to the immune system.

https://whn.global/scientific/covid19-immune-dysregulation/

There is an orchestrated push by capital to not acknowledge this basic fact.

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/media-celebrated-long-covid-a...

Anxiety can be quite disabling as well.

https://archive.ph/F1Br0

Kids don't want to be at school, teachers don't want to be at school, local residents don't want to fund schools.

In NYC public school reading/math comprehension is at 50%. They fail as measured by their own grading scale every year. In aggregate, public schools are always lagging behind their private counterparts.

Unfortunately once a large special interest group is subsidized by the taxpayer and a voter base is established for local politicians and the jobs program never goes away even though all evidence indicates the benefit to the taxpayer is marginal.

> They fail as measured by their own grading scale every year. In aggregate, public schools are always lagging behind their private counterparts.

This on its own communicates nothing interesting. It’d be surprising if this weren’t the case, given private schools possess the superpower of not having to serve everyone.

Public schools shouldn't either. At the end of the day the entire purpose of a school is against equality. History has demonstrated that while everyone can achieve a basic level of competence, there are real differences in hard working behavior and intelligence that helps you succeed in academia.

It's insane that public schools have to be some great equalizer and then they're simultaneously sold as preparing kids for the ultra competitive cutthroat world of academia and commerce.

Either they need to not be the great equalizer and prepare kids for the real world. This would mean not serving some kids with the same services (although again, a basic education would be guaranteed). Or we could admit that while we succeeded in building a basic education system, we have failed at building a public academic system for the early years and just let the private academia take over.

Are there similar changes at Montessori schools?

Maybe they could try making school less like prison, with less mandatory pointless toil?

I attending Montessori and enjoyed it, but this was 10+ years ago. We did not talk about the teacher's personal beliefs and politics, and there was no discussion of student gender or sexuality. It was focused on social and interpersonal development and academics. I understand some people believe discussing these sensitive topics is essential to student development, but I think it has made kids very uncomfortable and strayed too far from academics.

Despite what you've heard, they don't really talk about those things in public school either.

They absolutely do at least in CA starting in kindergarten

Discussion of gender seems to be pretty in-line with kindergarten education from what I remember 20 years ago. Hell, we even "voted" in the 1996 presidential election (I voted for the most attractive person, Bill Clinton).

By compartmentalizing school to a square on a zoom call for 2+ years why are they surprised when the students treat it like a square on a zoom call.

It said in the article that this was a problem for schools that reopened quickly too (although didn’t give numbers).

i wonder if videoconferencing also devalues the workplace

It certainly can; but it's less the video calls and more the endless meetings that they enable.

Dilbert talked about pointless meetings 25 years ago; Zoom has made it more prevalent.

At least if you're "off camera" you can just mute yourself and get some real work done.

Maybe they don't want to have bathroom breaks tracked

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838413

As I'm reading this, I'm also streaming the regional First Robotics regional championship in Georgia: https://www.twitch.tv/gafirst2

I note without comment that those kids aren't in school right now.

I’ve been a classroom volunteer teacher for a computer science / programming course at a local high school. I can attest that this is accurate - I’d estimate 20-25% of the class is absent on any given day that I’m there. And of the students that are present, there’s a good number of them who are checked out mentally and really don’t participate.

It’s surprising to me. Back when I was in school, I was extremely anxious missing any days. Elective classes are one thing, but I just don’t understand how students are missing multiple days of history or math or science and able to keep up.

For two years we said kids didn't need to be in school and many well off parents realized that what made their kids smart was their own involvement, not the schools.

My high school had a maximum of three absences per quarter or you would automatically fail your classes and have to appeal. As a perennially sick kid, this meant I just went to school super sick, all the time. I’m not sure that’s better for anyone.

Getting my tonsils removed as an adult was a literal life changer. I used to get strep 6 to 10 times a year. I have not had it since.

In unrelated news:

https://news.sky.com/story/number-of-long-term-sick-hits-rec...

The failure to prioritise rationality over economics is going to be seen as one of the biggest public health and economic failures in recent centuries.

An unleashed public health establishment leaping outside their area of expertise to successfully push for lockdowns was the largest unforced error in generations, one whose effects we’re still feeling years later. Scientists who study the allocation of scarce resources toward desired ends are economists, not epidemiologists.

A basic truth of economics is that people respond to incentives. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Public choice economics shows us that government employees likewise respond to career interest. Incentivizing people not to work and incentivizing another group of people to pump up their rookie numbers of people not working may create a slight inflationary pressure on the overall figure.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240329120646if_/https://www.ny...

I'd rather my kids go with me to Japan than spend a week learning that a new gender just dropped.

Looking at your comment history, your son might be better off at school than with you.

'London historically is a nice city. It's too bad that rampant criminal enterprise has been imported into it.' Jeeez.

[flagged]

i feel like this is just explained by sick days, flu season was crazy this year

post-covid people are more hesitant to send their kids to school slightly sick or when there are sick siblings / parents in the household.

This!

We don't send our kid to school with fever. Sending your kid to school with a low fever used to be very normal. But post-COVID we are more tempted to check the temperature when the head feels warm. But actually the better way to 'measure' a fever is how much a child is playing and energetic.

The final sentence of the article answers the headline with,

> “We haven’t seen an answer"

Alright.

My wife and I have noticed this, and it is really bizarre because it is across all kinds of demographics. We consider school mandatory for our son, except for medical reasons or significant events (funeral, for instance). Nearly all of his friends, even those that have teacher parents, will often be out of school, "because we wanted to go skiing" or "didn't feel like it today". I don't get it at all, like I didn't get the memo of "meh, school is optional".

Our son doesn't really even want to miss school, because he knows we'll make him do his missed work anyway. I guess we are old school (we are older, Gen X parents). The pandemic seems to have, if not broken, changed society in many fashions, and I guess schooling is one of them.

Many of his affluent friends still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug. We are far from "tiger parents", and push our son to mostly get As because he easily can do so, and feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work.

Weird times.

> still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug

> feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work.

Can you take an A or “advanced work” to the deli and exchange it for a sandwich?

The people you are criticizing realised the pointlessness of it all and that extra work (or knowledge) beyond a baseline doesn’t make a measurable difference worth the extra effort.

Long term, high school doesn't matter, college really doesn't either. One can accelerate the other which can accelerate life but long-term, if your kid sucks at life, no amount of school diligence will solve that. Inversely, if your kid sucks at school but is a good worker & intelligent, their school credentials won't matter.

Past the first job, credential specifics stop mattering really. No one will care whether you got an A or B+ in Calculus in junior year.

If the kid is doing alright and isn't getting into too much trouble, I don't see the issue of letting them play hookey with parent permission especially in their final years.

My parents had a policy that if we had good grades, we could skip days occassionally in our senior year. We'd take the day off and just pal around on errands if we wanted.

Just kept my kids out of school a couple days for skiing earlier this week. In my opinion, the education that school offers is only a small subset of all the things one can and/or should learn and experience in life. Academics are, of course, important, and we ensure that our kids are among the top of their classes. But there's so much more to life. I feel absolutely zero guilt for playing hookie to expose them to exciting, interesting, challenging, fulfilling experiences.

The ripple effect from our unhinged covid response continues to be felt in countless places, from school absenteeism to downtown office space values to public transportation and on and on. We created new habits that are hard to break and naturally none of the hysterics who tried to unwind society gave any thought to anything besides trying to temporarily feel “safe.” There’s always a tradeoff…

Another way to look at it is that during lockdown people realized that millions driving through rush hour every day to sit in a cubicle was a drain on the time of employees and a waste of company money in renting the building. I don't care if commercial real estate took a hit outside of impacts to pension/401k. We have the technology now and the pandemic proved it, so we can now evolve in that area. No need to be stuck in that hell loop forever.

Exactly this.

The curtain was pulled back and people realized the lies they were being fed by companies.

Turns out the business won’t fold if people are remote, and if you’re out sick that immovable deadline gets…moved.

Maybe it won’t collapse but maybe everything is only working 70% as well as it used to. It sure feels that way.

If purchasing power falls 30% it’s only fair that things are only working 70%.

Spoiler alert: purchasing power fell way more than 30%, so we are actually lucky things work still as much as they do.

Or another way to put it, if 50% of everything is bullshit, you can cut out quite a bit and still not really effect anything.

The number of TPS reports filed is not the actual value to the economy, but it gets counted in the GDP.

So the comment above admits that people are taking more time off and working less. So is your argument that the majority of work that we lost didn’t matter anyway?

Basically yes. There's a lot of useless beauracracy at pretty much all companies and the 40 hours took that into account. It seems like with remote work that some folks just started working like 35 hours and focused on the priority items which still got done. The mostly just skipped the useless meetings that were only there for the beauracracy. So the net effect hugely helped the individual, while having minimal impact on actual goals being achieved.

The biggest negative from WFH was it being more challenging to onboard new folks (a legitimate concern). It's less easy for someone new to pop into your cube, ask a question, and then get back to it. Now they have to do it through IM, or schedule a virtual conference. It's not all that much harder...just a bit of additional friction since things are more asynchronous. Maybe the senior engineer you need to talk to is sleeping in late and then working late and you're doing the opposite.

I'll add one additional negative is that WFH may interfere with our natural need to be social. This is extra hard on extroverts, but I think even introverts are impacted. They may be quiet, but I've talked to many that don't miss the disruptions or commute, but do miss just being around other adults to a degree. Some introverts struggle to find social outlets outside of work (especially outside large cities), so they spend a lot of time alone and naturally get lonely and this impacts their mental health. Everyone is different though and none of this is significant enough to force a return to office.

stigmatize the working class as boring while promoting alternative lifestyles as more attractive/worthy .. then tax their parents into the ground through run-away inflation.. strip them of any potential for home ownership or a stable life and then wonder why kids don't see any value in traditional education?

I hold views in both sides here. I teach computers at an elementary school on Thursdays, and my kids go to that school.

As an educator I see an impact of absences even in this fun class that kids want to go to and there isn’t a grade. We generally have a 1-2 or 1-2-3 approach to teaching something. That is: teach it one week, then review it, then teach or review it again the next.

When someone is out for two weeks they just don’t learn that concept and then later on need specialized attention to be caught up. Or in the case of larger class sizes or multiple kids out the whole class either has to be slowed down or those kids get left behind.

That to me is the bigger problem: absences change the velocity of the class and make it harder for not just the kids that are absent.

On the other hand: I wish school life was more flexible so I could take my kids to more life experiences. Grand parents live an 18 hour drive or an 18 hour flight away. We ski. We travel. And we value school.

I wish there was an easier “if you are out for this week, then here’s a link to the remote curriculum”, but as a teacher, it is the difference between supporting a fully remote office and a hybrid one. It’s more work and teachers are already overworked and under paid compared to the value they have on society.

During covid we had all remote school and while the outcomes of my kids suffered the flexibility was nice. I wish we, as a society and nation figured out how to find a way to make that work instead of going “back to normal” and learning/changing nothing.

For instance: I imagined a nationally backed “remote school” any student could optionally attend on a week they are sick or out. With both live remote lectures and pre-recorded content. Maybe parent guides for some homeschooling. Or if students are lagging behind in that model, maybe sunmer school becomes more normal (or some other creative solution).

It’s a bit like that Rick and Morty episode where he is in the VR game. “ What's this, you beat cancer and then went back to work at the carpet store? Boo.” We lived through Covid and then collectively decided to go back to the carpet store.

Our kids were too young for school during the pandemic (thank god, it seems like it really messed up kids lives).

Now they're both in early-years of school. Attendance is kinda interesting!

We parents EXTREMELY want the kids to go to school as it's the much-needed break to get our own work done - both in basic upkeep of our lives/household, and in our careers. We need the school hours to be long. Longer than they are, in fact. (As a side note, my kindergartener only gets like 20 minutes of recess? wtf? Have you met children before?)

On the other hand, life is expensive. Being restricted to only travel during the most expensive times to travel (around school holidays) isn't ideal. We can work with our kids to make up lost school time.

I also just don't like this third party entity whose value seems to go down every year to control our lives!?

Teaching (from the teachers point of view) increasingly is geared towards meeting metrics that are divorced from the needs of the kids. The teachers incentives are being misaligned with ours.

Additionally, I think we've (royal we) grown distrustful of public school in general. Not in a "big government" sort of way, just that we need to acknowledge that US public schools are designed for conformity. Being different (e.g. having ADHD, or being "on the spectrum") is not tolerated well - you might find your kid in a special needs bucket that effectively segregates them into programs that might not fit their needs at all.

At the same time, private school costs are huge and often the ones closest to you come not only in an extreme monetary cost a culture cost - being overly religious, or not religious enough (YMMV).

So, yeah, it's hard to really want or care to "be a model citizen" to the public schools that are increasingly putting up the pressure on parents (that's a whole other topic, why aren't grandparents capable of being helpful any more? where did our support networks go?) while standards that might be outside of the school's control are lowering their ability to give quality education.

(Also, pay the f*&king teachers, maybe!?)

Absolutely this.

For so many reasons, we need a well functioning public school system. Where "well functioning" means serving various needs of both children and parents. All children.

The importance of education is something that liberals and conservatives actually agree on. But like so much else, it's become a pawn in the culture wars, so that the most dissonant voices at the fringes drown out the common sense concurrence in the middle.

> my kindergartener only gets like 20 minutes of recess

What? In Norwegian kidergarten (barnehage) there are no formal lessons at all. The whole point of barnehage is to turn young animals into cooperating members of society not to teach them mathematics and reading, that comes later.

So the whole day is some kind of play time with intervals of helping to lay the table for lunch, having stories read to, going for walks in the woods, and a hell of a lot of playing outside in the rain, snow, mud, climbing, falling, etc.

And also it is the most effective way to teach a language. My English speaking children were able to speak Norwegian from a standing start at three years old within six months and indistinguishable from the natives within a year with no classroom instruction at all.

In part because the US has created "pre-school", which children attend for a year or two before kindergarten. This is more like the traditional kindergarten that you describe -- it is intended to get kids to learn to get along with each other, play nicely, sing songs, etc.

This is 100% it right here. When I was young, kindergarten was preschool (sometimes actually called that) and was also not mandatory. You could start school in first grade, and some schools didn't even have kindergarten.

Now preschool has standardized tests (!!!!!) and expected outcomes and kindergarten is worse. And 3K has been invented to be what preschool (and before that, kindergarten) once was. Of course, you can't go to 3K or 4K if you're not potty trained, which puts additional time crunches and restrictions on things.

Maybe it helps overall, but I'm not entirely sure it does.

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> In a working-class pocket of Michigan, school administrators have tried almost everything, including pajama day, to boost student attendance.

Wow, pajama day didn't bring back students? So strange.

I wonder if they tried less homework, shorter school-days and/or later start of the day? Basically the three reasons I myself was chronically absent from school for as long as I can remember.

The article highlights that many parents whose children are absent are treating the posted assignments/homework as the primary teaching tool, so cutting that back hurts absent kids (I also understand that homework’s has been massively scaled back already in most places). Shorter days unfortunately interferes with school’s role as state-provided daycare for working parents.

Later days is a solid idea, and I believe research shows it improves student performance at the highschool level, although if I understand correctly this is largely a scheduling/budget issue with how busses are staggered today.

> Shorter days unfortunately interferes with school’s role as state-provided daycare for working parents.

If that would be the intent, arcade cabinets, open play fields, parks and other social areas within school grounds would be the way to go.

My understanding is that the current school "format" was developed during the industrial revolution stage, and its meant to instill into kids that schedule and "lifestyle". Which to many extents hasn't kept up with the way society is evolving.

More funding into schools would help (which countries contribute significantly to education anyway?), but also by helping kids develop and learn in what they have an interest. Instead of the currently standardized boring circula. And the sometimes insane hours.

On that note, during highschool I had days where I've had up to 7 different classes a day. At least when you go to work, even if it's 8 hours, I (and maybe you as well) got to slack at least 1 hour a day in the morning, or even in the afternoon after the 1 hour lunch break.

As I understand it, USA is one of the highest funded education systems in the world. Funding for education even outpaces USA's um.. robust defense spending.

The trick is to look into total funding - beyond federal funding and into state funding.

I strongly agree that education in the internet age needs to evolve. I would love to see an education system centered around critical and entrepreneurial thinking, financial literacy, Cognitive Behavioral thinking tools. If you give kids something worthwhile they'll use it and come back for more.

https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/how-is-k-12-education-fun...

But it's also one of the biggest countries in the world.

It's simply too big and undeveloped for education to work as well as in, say, Switzerland. See also public transportation.

It's near the top per student as well.

Rural schools often do better than urban schools, so size and transportation are likely not the reasons.

The dude knows that. Can he have possibly used this argument in good faith. No. Can we call it out on HN without the conservatards flagging it. No.

My mom's a teacher in a decent school district in California, and later school times didn't have a significant effect on post-pandemic absences in her experiences (for the students who did come in, it did have a positive effect on their performance though).

The brutal truth is a subset of parents just don't care too much about education. It doesn't matter if it's an affluent or a working class district - there will always be a subset of parents that are either unable to (fairly common among impoverished parents sadly) or uninterested to (fairly uncommon among more affluent parents sadly) become much more involved parents

Basically, teachers assume parents will intervene in their students lives to give structure. Parents in the other hand assume teachers will intervene to give their children structure in their lives. And neither side will budge.

Some autonomy for kids is critical, but there also needs to be some amount of structure as well. You can't be 100% disciplinarian nor 100% free roaming. A happy balance is needed, and sadly, a handful of bad apples among both teachers and parents have deteriorated that relationship among these critical caregivers.

There are frequently threads on this site regarding the drop-off in fertility in advanced societies. When I point out that not all of us are capable of handling the stresses of modern child-rearing given the intense expectations for education and concomitant expense of that, someone will inevitably chime in with something like, "kids don't really need all that". I'm sure that they did not decades ago, and I'd love for it to be the case that they did not these days, but it seems that the future for those who do not make it through the system is rather bleak.

In all honesty, America is now a cutthroat society similar to those back in the old country (and even developed ones too like Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Israel).

A lot of Americans and Westerners in general seem to ignore that reality, and will fall behind.

~40% of pregnancies annually in the US are unintended, so the uninvolved/uninterested/under-resourced parent thesis isn’t unreasonable.

Absolutely!

There absolutely is a small subset of parents like that, though being in the Bay Area, access to abortion has been fairly common for decades, especially given the affluence of the district and the relative lack of stigma, so I don't see that as playing a significant factor.

~11.6 million children live in poverty in the US as of this comment, so while I have no context wrt the Bay Area (have never lived there), I can reasonably put forth that this cohort in particular will not receive the environment needed for robust educational development.

https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/43-children-in-pover...

Agreed, and I mention it in my comment as well, so IDK what your point is.

My point is that parenting is hard, expensive, very involved [1] [2], and it should be unsurprising that the success rate is not great from an attendance or academic outcome perspective. Not arguing with you, providing citations for my thesis that agrees with your anecdotes.

[1] https://archive.is/dXpQf

[2] https://archive.is/dXpQf/fba33991824e68e9b1ecfbde5c773bcbe92... (from [1])

Fair enough! Sorry for the standoffish tone! HN has been getting to me lately

Are you fucking kidding me.

I only have anecdata but the three kids I know of all have some kind of diagnosis making it hard for them in school. From my recollection it was more or less the same in my days just that the kids went to school and wasted their time. Some kids are definitely harder to help than others.

EDIT: This is for Sweden where we are talking about the same issue. But I do not think we have the same numbers here.

> some kind of diagnosis making it hard for them in school

This is a valid reason to be absent, and school administrators, teachers, and statistics take that into account.

My comment was aimed specifically at students who don't have valid physical or mental issues.

My mom's school district does not enforce suspensions for chronic absenteeism due to a subset of very affluent and litigious parents.

> This is for Sweden

Makes sense. There is no point comparing the Swedish or "American" system, as there are 13,187 different American systems that all have different norms and rules besides a handful stipulated by the DoE.

Even inter-US comparisons don't make sense for that reason.

Did schools really start later post-pandemic? Your entire first paragraph confuses me because I'm not aware of any shift in school start times.

I'm speaking only about California and specifically, the school district my mom works for.

As of 2022, Middle schools can start at 8am at the earliest, and number of school districts transitioned to a 8.30-9am start time. Some affluent school districts already did this transition in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

The US has roughy 13k school districts. Each one has it's own different sets of rules, regulations, and local political culture, and aside from limited State and Federal DoE regulation, implement their policies based on local political constraints due to the School Board and PTA.

Some School Boards and PTAs are apolitical in nature. Others are hyper-political and used as a stepping stone to enter local and state level politics (eg. Mayor, City Council, State Assembly, Congress) as donors won't donate without a proven electoral track record. Most younger (< 60yrs) Congressmembers started their political careers this way.

> if I understand correctly this is largely a scheduling/budget issue with how busses are staggered today

My California public school district had no busses. I still remember miserably making 7AM classes.

They still don't, even when I was a kid and even today.

I remember getting to school for the 7:45 AM class as some of the worst times of my childhood. Imagine a deep Polish winter, it’s -15 Celsius, you get up at 6:30 in complete darkness, you walk to a bus station to get on an overcrowded bus where you can barely even stand as all the other kids are going too. then starting the day with an hour of math with a sociopathic, incompetent teacher… it took me years to appreciate school and learning again

I have some similar horrible experiences with school but hey, isn’t it like an authentic prep for the real world?

> isn’t it like an authentic prep for the real world?

No. And if it were don't you think it would be better to teach the children how to improve the state of the world instead of perpetuating its evils?

"fat psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives!"

..or maybe if they focused more on academics, reducing bullying and violence, and less political-socializing students would feel they are getting something out of it.

How many academics do we need? How about teaching more crafts? Definitely agree that reducing bullying is a good idea though!

Less homework? My teenage children are in honors and AP classes and barely have any homework. I think they should have far more homework. When I was their age I spent a few hours a day on homework. Parents I talk to feel the same way. Give the kids more work to do at home to keep them off their phones and YouTube.

Homework has been demonstrated over and over again to not result in higher attainment.

If your children are so smart they can surely do some reading and research of their own. That's what I did back in prehistoric times (1960s and early 1970s). In the subjects I enjoyed I was consistently ahead of the bulk of the class and occasionally of the teachers simply because I read all the text books and spent time in the library. It was enthusiasm that drove my performance not the imposition of extra homework.

I still don't see any data from school maximalists that schooling is anything more than signaling (beyond basic math and literacy), and that kids wouldn't be much happier if they could spend time on projects and pursuits they were passionate about instead. My son is 6 and in 6 months of a Minecraft obsession he's fluent in English (besides Swedish and Chinese), learning about all sorts of concepts like animal breeding, crop rotation and automating factories and farms and building all sorts of machinery. Meanwhile school is teaching one letter a week. I can guarantee that if you put kids like him together with a bunch of other kids with the same passion and let them go wild building stuff with some guidance from a technically competent adult, they would come out much more prepared for life at 18. Fine if your kid has no curiosity or internal drive to do anything, but then I question what they will get out of school anyway.

Really? Just based on repetition and revisiting material you think it would have benefits

Most students do homework grudgingly. This is not like a high achieving software dev using spaced repetition.

References please. The claim that hw does not help retention sounds pretty unbelievable.

From the abstract:

“Although previous research has shown that homework improves students’ academic achievement, the majority of these studies use data on students’ homework time from retrospective questionnaires, which may be less accurate than time-diary data. We use data from the combined Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition to Adulthood Survey (TA) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore the effects of time spent on homework while attending high school on two measures of academic achievement: high school GPA and college attendance by age 20. We find that homework time has no effect on these measures of academic achievement.”

Rønning, M. (2008). Who benefits from homework assignments? (Discussion Papers No. 566). Oslo, Norway: Statistics Norway, Research Department. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ908287 Full text available http://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp566.pdf

HN is a fact free zone, didn't you know that?

I envy you! Both of my kids had unhealthy amount of high school homework.

I know many parents whose kids stayed up until 1-2am at least once a week. We expressed strong opinions to our kids that sleep is way more important than getting an extra grade bump, but many kids still trade sleep for a better grade.

Who are these kids? I have never met a child who would avoid sleep and stay up half the night to do homework.

/slight sarcasm.

Do you have kids? If so, what ages?

US schools have changed, a lot, in the last 30 years. Many schools now are pressure cookers on both the teachers and peer levels. So some kids stay up very late and some go on antidepressants. On the other side are schools where no one cares about academics, and the bar for good grades is no mischief. Which is also not a great school for any kid.

"I had to do it, so should the younger generation" is the the same line of thinking that delayed remote work a decade longer than it needed to be, and an over emphasis on knowing how to write in cursive.

I mean, you are their parent, if you believe that your kids don't have enough work to do, give them more work to do? why would that need to be handled through homework? the purpose of homework is to serve as a teaching aid to help students internalize and memorize the lessons given. If your kid is an honors student it sounds like he has learned what he needs to learn, why give them more homework?

"because teachers must slow down and adjust their approach to keep everyone on track."

Do this and then you'll have your top performers start being absent as well -- out of boredom.

I'd suggest sending kids that are lagging behind, and those that have high absentee rates, into remedial classes. Education should get kids excited about learning. From my experience, nothing gets kids more excited than the feeling that they've accomplished something. Make them sit in a room to rehash the same old crap over and over and you lose the ones you want.

Those ahead don't need additional benefit. We should be working to bring the left half of the distribution into the fold. If a student is so great that they're skipping out of boredom then there's little that a public institution should do to help them. They can go out with a head start and go get em.

This is a severely regressive policy, and -- by the way -- already the case. The vast majority of per-student resources are spent on the bottom 20% by performance.

Regressing to a point with less wealth and intellectual inequality?

>Those ahead don't need additional benefit.

Perhaps, but they also shouldn't be artificially held back. Life doesn't have a speed limit.

>If a student is so great that they're skipping out of boredom then there's little that a public institution should do to help them.

This doesn't follow at all. Why wouldn't you want to invest in the people with the most potential?

> shouldn't be artificially held back.

but are they? It seems like every school district has magnets, AP tracks, relationship with community colleges, extracurriculars, skipping a year,... for the smart ones.

We don't have "school districts" here nevermind any of that other stuff. Skipping a year is practically unheard of. There were "gifted and talented" programmes but those were just holding pens, there was no serious attempt to teach more advanced material

oki thx, I guess I don't have a clear idea of the wide range in how public schools are organized.

Agreed. Just shift them a year ahead, or in an AP track, or bury them in extracurriculars. It really doesn't seem that hard to me, to accommodate a precocious kid, especially in large schools or large public school districts. (shoot me down if I don't know what I'm talking about). The studious ones will be ok, has it ever been different?

Year-ahead works in high school where you're in various different classes anyway, but it can be harmful to the students in other ways, especially earlier.

Just because you're smart enough to perform at a 10th grade level doesn't mean you're mature enough or will fit in.

> because you're smart enough to perform at a 10th grade level doesn't mean you're mature enough or will fit in.

Makes sense.

If your top performers only perform to order then they really are not top performers at all.

Maybe we should call them potential top performers. We are talking about children after all.

Clearly you were a highly performant pupil. Most absentees in my experience were excited about tagging, smoking tobacco and other substances, working on their mopeds, consuming alcohol and going on adventures to other cities/countries.

Yeah, the ones that are lagging need more personal attention and fine-tuned lessons; unfortunately part of the issue is the teacher shortage, so they can't really make smaller classes.

Maybe sort the classes by ability, then?

The problem with streaming is that it is always tempting to put the best teachers in the more academically inclined classes because that is where they get the most visible effect. But of course it should be the other way about, the very best teachers should ve assigned to the students who find the whole affair the most difficult. The best students can often just be given an assignment and told to get on with it.

Sort the classes by learning speed, the faster kids aren't expected to do more or harder class work like today instead they get longer lunches, free periods, more recess and early dismissal. Only slow kids need homework, the fast kids get it done as part of class and peer grade themselves.

Frees up teaching resources for the slower kids and respects everyone's time. Puts the incentives in the right places, rewarding the diligent responsible students.

Are you rewarding diligent students or successful students? It usually ends up being the latter and the slower but diligent ones end up discouraged.

A diligent student with a learning disability or at the far edge of bell curve is in a sense "punished" I suppose, but they are punished with more instruction.

Like in life if they can find a way to work faster they can have more time for other things.

Ah yes put the kids struggling (let’s ignore it could be the teachers being bad that causes this) with the disruptive kids so it’s even harder for them to learn. Great solution.

I don't think I mentioned disruptive kids, but I have another solution for them. If they are disruptive, keep them out of the classes. First, in school suspension, then out of school suspension, then expel them.

Everyone treated it as optional. Even the teachers and school staff said zoom school is fine, it won’t be any worse or any different than in person school. Now we’re all shocked, shocked!

[flagged]

The policy response to the pandemic you mean

Or the lack thereof when it was happening, causing it to develop into a global pandemic with long term consequences that are swept under the rug because it's bad for the economy.

Agreed, the plebs should have been infected ASAP. We would have leapfrogged the economical development of other countries.

Or maybe just do what Europe did? America is unique in its decision to shut down schools, in California some districts were literally closed for a year.

Europe closed schools and businesses too.

Any particular reason you think that or just are you just a naturally good guesser?

[dead]

> Everywhere

* in the USA

Is school in the US optional? Over here (the Netherlands) school is mandatory for anyone under 18.

Skipping school without a valid reason (e.g. illness) comes with a €100/day fine.

School in Norway is not compulsory. Education is. When we wanted to take the children to the US with us for three months the headmistress tried to make out that we needed her permission but in the end she could only threaten us with the potential problem that there might not be a space in the school for them when they came back.

My wife asked for the lesson plans for the period and was grudgingly given them; all three of the children were ahead of their respective classes when we got back.

Does fining people make their educational attainments better? I know that such fines are a big thing in the UK but as far as I can tell it is just a burden on the poor and merely adds a small additional cost to family holidays for the well off that is offset by lower prices during term time.

There are truancy laws, but they're state/local (so there's no unified US standard), may also interact with the local school district's policy on absences, and there's often little enforcement effort. Parents may also "home school" which usually comes with significantly less overall scrutiny from the government, but the details of this also vary by jurisdiction.

(Yes, education policy in the US is an absolute mess.)

It’s relatively easy to pull your kid from the public school system (we submitted a form for each child, and have to provide a brief report annually on their homeschool progress), and the penalties you mention do not exist unless absence quantity is egregious (and typically, no financial penalties).

Where does the money go?

Where all money for fines goes, to the government.

Maybe you should read a site tailored to your local interests instead of one focused on Silicon Valley and adjacent cities.

Local interests? HN is a local interests site? That's an interesting take if you look at the stories being submitted, those making it to the homepage, or the diversity of commenters

Anyway even if you're from the USA, "everywhere" is still not a useful title: for all anyone knows, it means countries around the world. I'd equally expect our local news to specify "in Nederland" if that's what they mean. Opening such a site now, indeed the homepage specifies Zeeuwse beaches are the most polluted among Dutch beaches, it doesn't say "of all beaches". Another one says family of Israeli soldiers in the Netherlands are receiving more threats, rather than such family everywhere. I can't find any headline that's written like this

The title is simply somewhere between vague and misleading

All are welcome. It’s just weird to get upset that it’s US focused.

Put the # of days missed each year on the high school transcript and allow employers to filter job applicants on this basis. Make federal student aid for college conditional on having few high school absences. That would reward attendance.

That would codify the bullshit "perfect attendance' awards schools insist on handing out. Those kinds of incentives discourage people from isolating when they are sick. One of the many drivers of schools being breeding grounds for illness.

Employers would decide how to use the absence information. Maybe 10 or fewer absences in a year would be considered ok, but 50 or more a red flag.

You mean vulnerable kids and developing teenagers don't want to be bullied and shot? Gosh, you could just knock me over with a feather.